Cows and Waste in Islais Creek Marsh

Historical Essay

by Stephanie T. Hoppe

Stephanie T. Hoppe is a former staff counsel to the California Coastal Commission and a great-great-granddaughter of Peter Seculovich.

Part 6 of Peter T. Seculovich in San Francisco

Holly Park Circle, August 6, 1920, three decades after Seculovich's lots near Holly Park had started being developed.

Photo: OpenSFHistory.org wnp36.02343

By 1890, some 200 houses had been built around Holly Park, but elsewhere on Bernal Heights development remained sparse, limited to a few substantial residences on large or multiple lots, but more often modest one- or two-story structures on widely scattered 25-foot lots, with an occasional row of five or six houses put up by a builder. In 1894, the Chronicle described Bernal Heights as a “paradise of the agile goat and the speckled hen.” Some 1,500 to 1,800 horses, cattle and hogs reportedly ranged free among the scattered homes, causing damage to hedges, trees and fences and endangering children. The residents petitioned for extension of stricter “pound limits”—restrictions on the numbers of animals allowed—to this less-developed part of the city. Many of these animals were dairy cows, and the dairymen vociferously opposed any regulation (Chronicle, Call & Post, 2/22/1895).

Evidencing the large expanses of undeveloped land remaining throughout San Francisco, some 300 “government horses” left their Presidio “reservation” in 1899 to range over the Mission Hills and flounder into Islais marsh. Eight “swamped” horses were among the 23 impounded by the poundmaster, who charged $4 each plus $1/day. These horses were a short-term influx, but only after a long campaign—and, more to the point, increased residential population and political clout—were pound limits extended to Bernal Heights and enforced. The subsequent penning farther south of, for example, hogs, in large numbers proved a nuisance to residents there (Chronicle, 9/3/1899; Call & Post, 3/8/1896). As a public health issue, the city milk inspector fought to keep the dairy cows out of Islais marsh:

Just above Fifteenth avenue, on the San Bruno road, is as foul and nasty a stretch of swamp land as any germs of disease would care to repose in. Through the center of this morass run the waters of Islais creek, and sometimes at high water the main portion of the swamp tract is almost converted into a pond. There is an abundance of rotting vegetable matter, which forms its unstable bed, and the sluggish and slimy waters of the morass are rendered even more foul by the refuse from the sewers of the pesthouse and matter from the tanneries, soap factories and chemical works. The concentrated filth from all these sources penetrates the grass and soil of the swamp, and renders the former utterly unfit for nourishment for a beast. Even the ducks avoid the poisoned waters and fly past them to better feeding grounds below. At night the vapor and fog rise like a poisonous breath from the marsh and spread over the adjacent places. Nothing could offer more fitting opportunity for disease to breed in than this filthy hole. (Chronicle, 12/9/1895)

The Call & Post described the action when Milk Inspector Dockery drove out with a veterinary surgeon, Dr. Creely, to inspect

a number of places where cows were kept, but before they reached their destination they discovered nearly 200 cows feeding on the swamp grass. The inspector concluded that he would have positive proof of the ownership of these animals, which he declared could not give wholesome milk. He conceived the idea of driving them from the marsh to the main road, and from there to the public pound, where the owner will have to call for and claim them.

The inspector and doctor went to a place near by and changed their clothes for old and soiled ones, and when they appeared on the road they looked like tramps.

The pair started to drive the cows over one of the swamps, and were making good progress when suddenly a dozen men and boys, most of them with very little wearing apparel on, and two dozen dogs appeared upon the scene and stampeded the cows. The officers fired several shots in the air, which caused the men and boys to beat a retreat, but all but sixteen cows got away. These were secured and the Mission police summoned. (Call & Post, 12/9/1895)

Several men who claimed ownership of some of the cows were arrested, and the 16 impounded cows were driven to the pound, their milk to be examined. Returning to the San Bruno road the next day with Market Inspector Ben Davis, Dockery was gratified to find, “There was not a cow to be seen in the entire swamp.” He found one of the arrested dairymen had been held overnight and gave him “$50 in gold in order that he might have bail to return home from the Seventeenth-street Police Station to his weeping wife and children” (Chronicle, 12/10/1985). But that was not the end of his day.

On the return trip home he spied a wagon just turning into the San Bruno road from Fifteenth avenue, but the driver, instead of halting when commanded, put the lash to his horse and led the two inspectors a merry chase for half a mile or so. They finally rounded him up, however, and a sorry sight met their gaze when the wagon was inspected. Out of five calves being carried into market as food for the people of San Francisco three were found to be only four days old. The driver, Charles Ruhland, claimed they were two weeks old, though this would still make them sixteen days shy of the limit prescribed by law. Ruhland was arrested and booked at the Central station on a charge of offering for sale meat unfit for human food. Ruhland drives for I. S. Solomon, a wholesale cattle-dealer. (Call & Post, 12/10/1895)

Milk remained the primary issue, with considerable alarm raised by an unusual number of typhoid cases, a record number of 25 reported within a week, with 12 fatalities. Contaminated milk was thought the likely cause.

The typhoid epidemic in Oakland two years ago was traced directly to cows which were allowed by their owners to graze on the salt marshes. The fatality attending the Oakland scourge is still fresh in the minds of the public, particularly the physicians. The typhoid cases reported at the Health Department during the past six days are not confined to one locality, but are to be found in every section of the City. Were it otherwise the extraordinary number could be easily attributed to some local cause, and would create no alarm. But with reports coming from North Beach, the Mission, Richmond, and, in fact, from every section of the City, the physicians conclude that it must be caused by the milk. (Call & Post, 12/10/1895)

Conflict over cows in the marsh continued, indeed, escalated. In 1897, the Chronicle reported a battle over “forty-three cows that were belly-deep in the mire that is charged with all the deadly germs contained in the discharge from the sewers of the Pesthouse, the City and County Hospital and the residences along the line of Army street.” The poundmaster and four mounted assistants rode into the swamp to drive the cattle toward shore, and two dairymen “rolled up their trousers and waded into the swamp, intending to drive the animals out of the reach of the officers.” The milk inspector—Dockery—ordered them out of the swamp, but only after he and the market inspector each fired a shot overhead did the cowmen retreat. Another dairyman threatened to shoot Dockery and departed to retrieve a gun from his home. A mounted police officer attempting to calm everyone was slapped in the face, upon which he dismounted and beat the cowman involved, who was taken to the hospital to be treated for severe lacerations of the scalp before being booked at the police station. Dockery fired at but missed yet another protesting cowman who was running toward him. With the cows finally corralled, the inspectors found one that “looked consumptive” and shot her. The owner attacked the inspectors with a “wild swing, and was countered by Dockery with a straight right on one of his eyes.” An autopsy of the cow found the lungs and viscera to be tuberculous. The remaining cows were driven to pound; owners claiming them would have their permits to sell milk taken from them. Three years later, several dairymen received fines—downgraded from prison terms—for assaulting the poundmaster in another standoff (Chronicle, 10/1/1897, 2/27/1900, p. 9).

Milk and meat were not the only contaminated foods at issue: The swamp complained of extends for about half a mile from the mouth of Islais Creek north. It is crossed by the San Bruno road, which has been built above its level, but with the exception of this interruption it is a great waste of fetid sewage, covered with rank green vegetation. The swamp at this season of the year is covered with from six inches to a foot of foul water. This is mainly supplied by the Islais Creek, which is the outlet for a number of sewers. Upon the banks of the swamp are tanneries, soap works, chemical factories and dairies. The refuse from these runs directly into the swamp. Butchertown also contributes its foul quota to the health-destroying pool.

The city’s official bacteriologist examined a sample of the swamp water and “pronounced it teeming with deadly disease germs. This could hardly be otherwise,” he said, “for, besides the germs which would naturally be generated in such a mass of decayed matter, the sewers from the City and County Hospital and from the Pesthouse empty here.” “From this hotbed of disease,” the Call & Post continued:

a large part of the city’s supply of watercress is gathered…Italian vegetable peddlers on their way to the markets in the early morning stop at the swamp long enough to cut great quantities of the green delicacy. It grows so thick and rank and is of such easy access to the San Bruno road that it is a matter of only a few minutes to lay in a supply for the day. Then this vegetation, nurtured where death lies hidden in every drop of water, is sold in the markets and finds its way to tables of rich and poor alike.” (Call & Post, 10/16/1897)

Despite—or perhaps because of—the pollution, waterfowl frequented

a pond formed by outfall of Islais Creek swarming with ducks of all kinds, especially mallards, brown-heads and long-bills. More than 200 hunters yesterday, tramping in the marshes, boats on the pond, scores on the line of the old bridge. At dusk, as the tide ebbs and fresh food supply appears, a fusillade is kept up when a band of ducks come in from the bay, to the great danger of pedestrians on Kentucky street and the bridge. Numbers of the slaughtered birds are lost, since the only chance the gunners have of recovering them is by fishing them up with a hook and line as the tide carries them out. (Call & Post, 1/4/1892, p. 4)

An uncounted number of humans also lived in the marsh, building homes and raising crops on spots of high ground. A dispute between several households near Eighteenth Avenue culminated in a sensational killing. By 1900, the “pesthouse” built in Gold Rush Days near Franconia Landing to quarantine travelers arriving with smallpox or other diseases considered contagious, was reduced to three shanties that housed 16 persons with leprosy in considerable squalor. Crossing the marsh at night also presented risks: a baker walking homeward on unlit Fifteenth Avenue in early 1900 slid off the embankment into thick mud up to his neck, from which he extricated himself only the next day, to be discovered lying in the roadway by a rare passerby and taken to hospital suffering from exposure (Examiner, 10/28/1896; Chronicle, 4/9/1900).

Increasing population eventually ended both the free roaming of livestock and the keeping of them in pens such as the one next door to Seculovich. Problems with sewage, however, only increased with the growth in population. Sewers in San Francisco, like streets and water, gas and electric lines, were generally built after rather than before homes and businesses. People purchased a plot of bare ground, built what they pleased and figured out on their own how and whether to supply water and dispose of waste. In time, the city or residents of individual blocks or several blocks at a time hired contractors to install wood, brick or iron pipes, which they emptied into adjacent downhill lines, if available, or open drainage ways or a sump in the intersection of the street. Fraud, delay and excess cost were part of the process, according to an investigation by the Examiner in 1896:

The property owners between Islais creek and the Five-mile House and Hunters’ Point and the San Bruno road have, after years of trouble with street contractors, realized that they have gained little or no benefits from the thousands of dollars they have expended on the streets and sewers in the district. Hundreds of hard working men who have toiled for years to win homes for themselves and their families have been made beggars through the schemes of the graders, while others who were more fortunate to command better incomes are kept on the verge of poverty paying the enormous assessments that are levied on them for the alleged improvements to the streets in the vicinity of their lots.

“Most men are not averse to having proper and sanitary drainage to their premises,” the reporter observed, and they are easily induced to sign a contract for a sewer in their block.

After that the contractor’s work is easy. He puts down the sewer. In South San Francisco it is generally a large one, and one far larger than the needs of the district will require for the next fifty years. The trench above it, however, is only partially filled. That is not done by accident. It is for a purpose. It makes a waterway for the first rains that fall, and the current in sweeping down keeps washing away the roadway until a gully has been formed down the middle of the street that prevents traffic. The unfortunate householder is unable to reach his home without discomfort. The contractor, who already has a lien on his property for laying the sewer and is collecting interest monthly on the amount due him for the work, has the property owner in his grasp. He proposes to grade and pave the street. The water-gutted roadway is a strong argument in favor of having the work done, and as the householder dare not oppose the contractor the latter easily receives a contract for doing the work. When it is completed more and heavier assessments are levied and the owner of the property along the street finds that he is assessed for improvements for more than his holding is worth.

Nor is this the end of the matter:

The city has established no official grades in the district, and those who are paying so dearly for all the unnecessary work done in front of their homes will be called upon sooner or later to pay more assessments when uniform grades are established. (Examiner, 2/18/1896)

Sewer problems and projects could take many years. In December 1879, the city awarded contracts for a sewer on Army Street (present-day Cesar Chavez Street) from the San Jose road, that is, one block west of Mission Street, to the San Bruno road. Lacking authorization to extend across either of these streets, once built, at a cost of $130,000, the sewer could not be used. It was laid well above the actual grade of the San Bruno road, which, to make a functional outlet to Islais Creek, would have to be raised about 14 feet and cross several intervening blocks of private property. Engineers recommended that on account of “the land being low, marshy and liable to sink,” the sewer should be built of wood and reconstructed in masonry when “by the filling of the street, it should have become solid” (Chronicle, 2/17/1880). Army Street generally followed the alignment of Precita Creek, an arm of Islais Creek that extended west to Mission Street and was surrounded on both sides by extensive marsh, and was itself not very reliable. Thirteen years later, the wooden sewers collapsed, opening sinkholes in the streets and obstructing traffic (Chronicle, 10/1/1893, p. 9; Call & Post, same day, p. 14).

View north on Treat from 17th Street. Crew posing with sewer cleaning machine, August 8, 1919.

Photo: OpenSFHistory.org wnp36.02208

A citywide solution to sewage disposal was already under consideration in the 1890s with research on the strength and location of currents in San Francisco Bay that might carry the waste out to sea. The Examiner editorialized initially that such a system was absurd and matters should be left as they were, but by the end of the decade embraced plans for a grand sewer project to serve 90 percent of a city of 1 million inhabitants. The population at the time was around 300,000. A line 8 feet in diameter starting in Glen Park and Bernal Heights would carry waste northeast by gravity, discharging at North Point into strong currents expected to dilute and carry it away to the ocean (7/17/1893, 10/24/1899). Only in the 1980s, following the passage of the federal Clean Water Act and the availability of federal money, did San Francisco finally begin to implement an overall system for the collection and treatment of wastewater, which to this day remains unfinished.

* * * * * *

In these years while Seculovich pursued neighborhood issues, his daughter, Jennie, grew to adulthood. She later reported receiving eight years of schooling, so by the mid-1880s, in her early teens, she would have been out of school. She may have stayed at home, keeping house for her father and herself—no small task in those days without gas or electric cooking stoves, refrigeration, washing machines or vacuum cleaners. But more likely, like thousands of other young teens in the city, she looked for paid employment. In 1889, when Jennie was 19, she was listed individually in the city directory at the address of the family home with the occupation of glovemaker. By then if not earlier, she was working at the Carson Glove Factory at 316-318 Market Street, which manufactured heavy work gloves. We can picture her riding the new electric streetcar to work, either alone or with her father if he had business that day at city hall. She would have spent 10 hours a day, six days a week, seated beside other young women at long rows of sewing machines. The better-paid work of cutting the leather for the gloves was restricted to men.

Joseph Theriot and Jennie, 1915.

By 1894, Jennie was forelady at the factory, and the following year she married the factory owner’s brother-in-law, Joseph Theriot, a young man employed as a compositor and printer for the Evening Post. The couple initially lived with the extended Carson family in an apartment building on Broadway near Van Ness Avenue, then for a time with Seculovich and then rented an apartment at 130A Castro Street. In July 1897, their daughter, Violet Josephine, was born. By 1900, they bought or built a house at 1230 Tenth Avenue, just across Lincoln Avenue from Golden Gate Park, where they lived for many years. Joseph Theriot shared Seculovich’s interest in real estate, in his case in the newly developing Sunset district.

All sources for this 10-part article appear at end of Part 10.

Return to Part 5 • Continue reading Part 7